A year out from the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games, the promise by the Chinese government to allow foreign journalists to report freely on China, and thereby project the image of a modern and open country, is under severe doubt.

On Monday this week a press conference was held by Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) in the Chinese capital to highlight this very issue. According to reports, uniformed and plainclothes police pounced after the event and detained up to twelve journalists for almost two hours. Some were asked to turn over their tapes. They refused.

While all but one of the 37 venues is complete and Beijing itself seems to have been rebuilt brick by brick, there is perhaps another kind of renovation and reconstruction that needs to take place for China to achieve its long-held goal of knocking Sydney off its “best Olympic Games ever” perch. Multiply the dozen journalists at the RSF press conference by the thousands expected to descend on China to cover the games, and you get a pretty good idea of the public relations disaster waiting to occur.

The pollution in Beijing might find athletes gasping and wheezing as they cross the finish line, but will a journalist lock-up be the lasting image of China’s Games?

The head of the Australian Olympic Committee John Coates has given a guarantee that Australian athletes will be able to discuss freely human rights and other issues, but as much as we might respect the views of Brooke Hanson or Liesel Jones, they would likely agree that they are not going to be able to give us a full picture of what’s happening in China.

What experience would they have of the restrictions on ordinary Chinese citizens to assemble, to organise an independent union, to successfully contest development and challenge corruption or to write about what some like to refer to as the Three Ts – the forbidden topics of Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen?

We need to know exactly what guarantees there are that journalists can cover these issues freely and whether the Chinese themselves will be allowed to speak out about these issues, if they choose to, without the fear that they will be persecuted once the journalists all go home.

In the preface to the Service Guide for Foreign Media, Liu Qi, the president of Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, says, “The freedom of foreign journalists in their news coverage will also be ensured.”

Elsewhere the Guide says, “Foreign journalists can carry out reporting activities not only on the Beijing Olympic Games and the preparatory period, but also on politics, economy, society and culture of China.”

The period covered by this relaxing of restrictions began in January 2007 and continues for a month after the Olympics are over.

But it should be a matter of great concern that since January 2007, the beginning of this period, there is still evidence of restrictions on foreign journalists. In addition, officials appear to be backtracking on the guarantees and they have made no effort to extend them to Chinese journalists.

In March the BBC correspondent James Reynolds was stopped from reporting on the aftermath of a riot in Hunan province in central China. He wrote on his blog that the military told him the new regulations were “only for Olympics-related stories”.

According to Human Rights Watch, other foreign correspondents have been stopped or detained along China’s border with North Korea and in Henan province, now notorious for the blood selling scandal that saw HIV infection rates skyrocket in a number of villages.

Any suggestion that this is all simply a matter of cadres and police in the provinces being uneducated about the new regulations is unlikely given the actions of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in May. They summoned a German and an American journalist and warned them about their reporting on Tibet, calling their articles “false” and “unacceptable”.

Tim Johnson, the China correspondent for the American McClatchy newspaper chain said that while he was in Tibet he was followed by security guards and the people he spoke to were subject to interrogation and fines. (He was writing about mountain climbing.)

In an open letter written to the president Hu Jintao, the premier Wen Jiabao and the international human rights community, a number of prominent Chinese citizens, including Dai Qing the well-known writer and Bao Tong, a former top aide to the purged Chinese Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang (ousted as part of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown) have called for a number of steps to be taken to ensure that China hosts an Olympics “in an authentic Olympic spirit” and of which “China and the world commuknity can be proud”.

Included is the call for the government to implement the ordinance allowing “foreign journalists to conduct interviews and reporting without pre-approval by authorities” and “granting Chinese journalists the same access and independence”.

Maybe journalists should worry less about Liesel Jones’ views, and focus more on the views of the other Australians who are consultants and advisors to the Beijing Olympics (many of the same people who helped make the Sydney Olympics such a success).

And let’s not forget Australia has a representative on the International Olympic Committee, Kevin Gosper. When he’s not b-tch-slapping Taiwan (which actually has a free press) about its refusal to let the torch relay force a symbolic reunification with the mainland, he is Chief of the IOC Press Commission.

His latest act is to recommend that athletes be allowed to blog from Beijing – again ensuring we get Liesel’s take on it all. (Get the feeling this fuss about athletes’ freedom of expression is a distracting sideshow?)

What I want to know is what steps Gosper will take to ensure that we get our journalists’ take on it all. How will he ensure Beijing lives up to the promises in its Service Guide for foreign journalists? Will he try to convince Beijing to expand those rights to Chinese journalists?

After all, the world might not be surprised that a one party state has difficulty allowing criticism (absolute power corrupts absolutely, after all), but surely an Australian can appreciate the value of a robust, free press.

Chip Rolley is an Editor and freelance writer, with an interest and focus in literature and Chinese politics and culture.